Tuesday, August 23, 2011

2. Way Into The Flowering Heart

This is the same double day lily that grew in Anna's garden in Media but which Elizabeth revealed came originally from Uncle George's farm in Worcester, home of the Schwenkfelder emphasis on inner spirituality over outward form. They brought saffron to America and declined amalgamation with the United Church that swallowed most of the other pietistic groups. Their pastors were chosen by lot from the congregation like Mennonites. Several of Uncle George Reiff's daughters, Katie, Lena and Susie, were members.

Raising Hands with the Mind

A lily is the centerpiece of this imagination that transfers Christ and His
redemption to nature. Perhaps the likeness is more than symbolic. Among architectures of furnished rooms and philosophies of hymns,
gardens and kitchens, this sacrament is the inner garment of earth.

The inward care of earth, the great poem of earth that remains to be written, Wallace Stevens says in The Necessary Angel), finds its unspoken search of the devotional attitude flowering in Johann Arndt's Paradies Gartlein, the book that would not burn (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 245, and in Gerhard Tersteegen's Spiritual Flower Garden of the Inner Soul (Geistliches Blumen-Gärtlein inniger Seelen, 1729, Germantown 1747), which was also sung. So if it is said that “Pennsylvania German folk art is basically spiritual in
concept and its motifs and designs are non-representational
expressions of traditional Christian imagery” (Stoudt, vii), there is some likeness here with theologian Cornelius van Til calling it a Christian earth along with a Christian moon and sun. Citing Stoudt in
defense of the lily is a little like taking Wallace Stevens as he
is, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, for we delight to equivocate Dutch men. Stoudt says that when the underlying faith
of this people was lost, so was its art. Wallace Stevens also
changed from a Berks County farmer to a poetry sophisticate.

If you're of this folk you will be feeling better when you understand that before its elaboration in the writing of Boehme and in Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister the lily in the hymns and gardens is an image
from the Song of Songs. This inner gardenof the larger medieval setting of the terrestrial paradise, of the German
Minnesong and baroque German religious poets (Stoudt, 56), Bernard of
Clairvaux and even more obscure Dionysian Neoplatonists, contemplated the
lily much as did the English metaphysical poets. Hymnists and poets “escaped to illuminated writings, to the
decorated chest, and to pottery” (Stoudt, 92). So a four fold
progression accounts the Bible, Boehme, hymns and folk art.

Blossoming the Lily

Fraktur

As its primary philosopher, Jacob Boehme, was vexed with the soil of this flowering, for the lily was of the earth. "A fair flower grows out of the rough earth which is [also] not like the earth, but declares by its beauty the power of the earth, and how it is mixed of good and evil; so also is every man, who, out of the animal, wild, earthly nature and quality, is born again so as to become the right image of God."

This flower was to the soil what the human was to the animal, except that man was also a plant. For Boehme the image of God in man in the earth emerged as if from a plant: "For those who are a growth of such a kind, and are shooting forth into the fair lily in the kingdom of God and are in process of birth, have we written this book” (Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 4). So "he will blossom like a lily" (Hosea 14.5) making a paradise where none was before. This imaging of the man as a plant overcame the notion that nature was tainted with the human. As all creation groans and travails for its redemption, the man is both its fall and its rise.

A flowering heart would connote a flowering mind much as the mystical heart diagrams of Paul Kaym, Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel (1680) give as a series of heart-head images engraved by Nicolaus Häublin, who illustrated the works of Boehme. Many works of alchemy find comfort in Boehme, who exchanged letters with Kaym whose16 engravings showing how the heart is attacked, receiving light waves from the sun and moon, as inletters 8 and 11 of Boehme's, later published,
Epistles. Paul Kaym had written to Boehme in 1620 asking him about the
'end of time', and was so answered. Kaym also wrote commentaries on the Song of Songs
and the Book of Revelation. That theseare
concomitant awith alchemical texts or other mystical Boehme letters is irrelevant to the fact an air clogged with unseen spiritual beings. The study of alchemical texts cannot produce such
life altering effects, it rather defeats them, since the person is bogged in rituals and sacrifices that only embroiled them further in darkness, as witnessed by the brows of patrons at S. Weiser books. Why do the rich and the
royal families seek alchemy then, if it’s only for profit? Because they have no
other means of life.

The lily as an image of nature's redemption, is not however drawn strictly as a botanical lily. This Lily is unknown, a stylized “use of natural events and objects to describe spiritual conditions." Stoudt said that such collective images underlay the life of the Pennsylvania Dutch in hymns, flowers, pottery and linens and “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land” (3).

The last thing Pennsylvania Germans would want to seem is spiritual, which partly explains the discredit Stoudt suffered even if the spiritual intellectuals, Conrad Beissel (1691-1768), baker, founder of Ephrata and Boehme, a shoemaker, were peasants. Boehme influenced Milton, Newton and Emerson, they say, and was early translated to English (1647-1661). At the other end of the centuries Wallace Stevens, baptized at his death, reaffirmed his early life in this tradition of luminous indicia of imagination in his The Necessary Angel, a reflowering from his mother's Bible. The hymnals sang of die unfgehende lilie, the opening lily, the lilen-Zweig, the lily twig and wohlriechenden lilen, the fragrant ones (Stoudt, 85, 89, 95). This inescapable Dutch “tulip,” as Stoudt has it, was an “inarticulate belief in [all] the artist’s heart.” (Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 15).

Detail, silver napkin ring Berks County c. 1880

Pennsylvania German art embodies a spirit of Inwendigkeit,
interior, innerness that decides everything material and immaterial by
the mind. Marriage is an imagination, dress an imagination, praising God
is an imagination, raising hands with the mind and with the arms. All
things are first and last imagined, whether household effects such as chests, linen,plates, or fraktur art, all celebrate an “uncontaminated good within natural reality” (Stoudt, Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 101). Is it too much to say all human life is this way?

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"In the Composition the Father had the same Way as in his Writings, viz : he suspended his considering Faculty, and putting his Spirit on the Pen, followed its Dictates strictly, also were all the Melodies flown from the Mystery of Singing, that was opened within him, therefore have they that Simplicity, which was required, to raise Edification." Peter Miller, Intro to Conrad Beissel's Ninety Nine Mystical Sentences.

"In the Composition the Father had the same Way as in his Writings, viz : he suspended his considering Faculty, and putting his Spirit on the Pen, followed its Dictates strictly, also were all the Melodies flown from the Mystery of Singing, that was opened within him, therefore have they that Simplicity, which was required, to raise Edification." Peter Miller in his introduction to Conrad Beissel's Ninety Nine Mystical Sentences (3), on Beissel's Method of Composition. [Miller translated the first 14 pages of the 1730 publication into English, c. 1771]